


head is somewhere in between

by trell (qunlat)



Category: Borderlands (Video Games)
Genre: Corporate Espionage, Gen, Non-Consensual Drug Use, Pre-Borderlands 3, They/Them Pronouns for Zer0 (Borderlands)
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2020-07-19
Updated: 2020-07-19
Packaged: 2021-03-05 00:13:24
Rating: Not Rated
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 10,701
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/25385101
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/qunlat/pseuds/trell
Summary: In which there is a conference, and Rhys gets something important stolen out of his brain.(Or: the precipitating event of the Atlas-Maliwan war.)
Relationships: Katagawa Jr. & Rhys (Borderlands), Rhys/Zer0 (Borderlands)
Comments: 7
Kudos: 78





	head is somewhere in between

**Author's Note:**

> (Content warning in end note.)

Back when he and Vaughn had still been Hyperion stooges, Rhys thinks on his way out of the conference hall, the second night of any good B2B would’ve been _party night:_ the estimable part of the weekend when anyone who was anyone packed into a hotel suite, and got totally, unreservedly plastered. No doubt the tradition endures—especially at a big-name annual conference like the Triangulum Robotics Expo, _especially_ on a planet like Demophon—but Rhys is equally sure that he no longer has the constitution required to survive any party involving a _keg._

Vaughn would probably say he’s getting _old_ , and _uncool._

Then again, Vaughn’s currently out in the Pandoran wastes, getting in touch with his inner bandit and forsaking the beer-drinking lifestyle in favor of blood feuding and not wearing pants. Maybe he wouldn’t be against turning in early. _My body is a temple,_ Vaughn had proclaimed upon Rhys’s last visit, right before tearing into a haunch of roast skag.

Rhys shakes his head, and turns to give Zer0 an apologetic smile. They’ve followed him into the hall, and he walks briefly backwards, aiming for the lobby. “I hope that panel was at least a little less boring for you. Somebody’s bound to send one of those ugly mechs after me the moment they hit the market, right?”

Zer0’s faceplate displays a smiling emoticon with a nose. “You attract trouble,” they say. “A neodymium shard / amid ferrous metals.”

That makes Rhys laugh. “Please, degauss me!”

The two of them have just finished with this year’s keynote, Maliwan’s presentation on a series of mobile shield units they plan to retail in Andromeda in the next quarter. It’s not why Rhys is here—all the topics _he’s_ interested in had been packed into this morning, relegated to the conference slush pile—but he’s hardly fool enough to ignore the competition, and there’s always something to learn.

He’s seized by a huge yawn, feeling that early start. _Zer0_ doesn’t seem tired, but then, Rhys has a sneaking suspicion that they’d slept through most of the morning panels. He can’t exactly blame them: applied robotics in capital infrastructure probably isn’t captivating to anyone who isn’t neck-deep in figuring out how to repair the rotting skeleton of Atlas’s abandoned planet, as Rhys decidedly is. Revitalizing Meridian is a full-time job on top of his full-time job, and these days he’s more than a little invested in the outcome; hence why he’s here now, skulking around a conference to which by all rights he ought to have sent a perfectly capable underling. He’s already encountered a nanobot startup he fully intends to partner with to repair failing water mains in Meridian East, even if the straight-out-of-college company reps _had_ nearly fainted upon receiving his card.

They exit into the hotel lobby, a wide open space dotted with real and holographic trees and encapsulated by a glass dome. It provides an excellent view of the surrounding towers, glittering opulently in the evening dark, and Rhys appreciates the vantage as they circulate towards the open bar, thinking on how different this skyline is from Meridian.

He gets himself a drink, feeling like he should at least _hold_ an alcoholic beverage before turning in, and is about to tell Zer0 that they’re welcome to bunk off for the night when they say, “A request for you,” beating him to it. “An evening off to tend to / matters of my own.”

“What?” Rhys says, surprised. “What kind of matters?” Demophon is hardly a vault hunter sort of place; here in the capital city of Celeus it’s all sparkling glass and corporate sleaze, avarice dressed up as gentrification.

(He’d wondered, flying down from the shuttleport, what the local corporations had had to tear down to make way for their mirrored spires. He gets how that goes, now; and maybe Meridian won’t be so picture-perfect, when Rhys is done with it, but at least it’ll be a real place. A city for people to _live in_ , not for executives to look at from hi-rise hotels.)

Zer0’s reply is enthusiastic. “A job in the works / I miss such tests of my skill. / Back in the morning.”

“A job? Wait _,_ you mean—” Rhys snaps his mouth shut before the words _corporate assassination_ can escape. “ _Oh._ I mean, yeah! No problem, feel free to take off, I’m not going anywhere . . . um.” He rubs the back of his neck, uncertain. “Have . . . fun?”

The beaming smiley face that flashes back at him is entirely unequivocal, so, yeah, all right. Fun.

Rhys smiles crookedly in return, and watches Zer0 vanish into the crowd, wondering—not for the first time—what miracle allowed him to persuade someone _so cool_ to come work for someone _so lame_. They just picked up a corporate black ops gig for _fun_ , for god’s sake; what has Atlas got that compares to that?

A horrible thought occurs to him. What if pulling this job reminds Zer0 of how exciting their life used to be before they signed up to babysit Atlas’s CEO? What if he’s bored them so much with this stupid conference that they decide to _quit?_

Oh, god. He made a vault hunter-slash-assassin sit through a panel about _structurally unsound bridges_.

He needs to give Zer0 a raise. Or a super sick gun. Or, like, an entire line of super sick guns? _Special edition Atlas sniper rifles, limited run, available exclusively to badass ninjas employed by yours truly . . ._

Yeah, okay. He’s gonna do that, and it’s gonna be awesome, and his super cool bodyguard isn’t going to quit.

Good plan, Rhys. _Go team._

He’s already panic-designing the first gun in his head—well, partially in his head, partially throwing together pieces of old schematics on his ECHOeye overlay—when somebody drawls, “Why, if it isn’t the CEO of Atlas. Come to see how the big boys do warfare, did you? I trust you enjoyed your glimpse of true state-of-the-art.”

Rhys blinks, refocusing his eyes, and finds himself face-to-face with _Katagawa Yatarō Jr., Head of Stockpile Inventory, Maliwan Corporation. Notable relations: Katagawa Yatarō (father), CEO and majority shareholder, Maliwan Corporation. Recent news . . ._ Another blink disperses the ECHOeye infodump, allowing him to take in the man himself. Katagawa is young—mid-thirties at the outside—and sharply dressed in sleek tailored black, accented by orange piping at the cuffs and lapels. His shirt is a dark Maliwan turquoise, and the tie at his throat is done up in slashes of the same corporate colors, white-orange-blue. Eye-searing, but somehow he manages to pull it off.

A fact which does nothing at all to keep Rhys’s knee-jerk reply in check: “Sorry,” he says, irritated, “was that a dig at our marketing, or our robotics? I don’t think I heard you over that _tie_.”

“Says the man selling pistols that look a mushroom growth on your arm. Really, Rhys”— _Strongfork,_ Rhys wants to correct—“when you’ve achieved a well-functioning piece of technology, there’s no need to clutter the marketing with a gimmick. Wrist mounts and joystick firing mechanisms, what’s the point of that? You’ve got to let the gun speak for itself.”

Rhys has a fleeting vision of strangling Katagawa with his own stupid tie. “It isn’t a _gimmick._ ”

“No? What do you call it, then?”

“Accessible weaponry.” His reply is instant; Rhys has made this pitch to stakeholders so many times he could probably recite the whole spiel in his sleep. “Not everyone can pull a trigger, or hold a vertical grip. A pistol produced by any leading manufacturer weighs, what, three pounds? If your customer lacks the forearm strength to hold that aloft for long periods, they’re just not going to buy. Besides,” he shrugs his right shoulder, the motion drilled into him by all those presentations, “everyone agrees it pays to have a free hand in a fight.”

Katagawa’s eyes fall to his robotic arm, and Rhys thinks, _Yeah, see me, you bastard._ Of course, Katagawa doesn’t know how New Atlas started—nothing prior to their breakthrough into the galactic market is public knowledge, and Rhys prefers it that way—but that doesn’t matter. Katagawa doesn’t need to know that Rhys built his own original prototypes, or that he did it while stuck in an underground bunker with one arm and one eye and a hole in his head. That’s the beauty of the pitch; all Rhys has to do is say the words, shrug the shoulder, and his audience’s imagination will do the rest.

He’s not sure what Katagawa’s imagination comes up with, but Katagawa pulls a face like he’s just smelled something unpleasant. “Oh. You’re targeting the _niche_ market.”

Rhys manages to refrain from dragging a hand through his gelled hair, settling for a rough exhalation. “What do you _want_ , Katagawa?” For the first time, he wonders what Maliwan’s Head of Stockpile Inventory is doing here. This is a B2B for advanced robotics; even with Maliwan on the schedule, it’s nothing to do with Katagawa’s branch of the business. Is he scouting for gaps in the market? Trying to determine what’s worth moving up the supply chain? Hell, there’s people for that—entire _departments_ of people, none of whom report to _Stockpile Inventory._

Then again, Rhys isn’t really supposed to be here either. Maybe Katagawa’s just bored.

This theory finds further support in Katagawa’s shrug of, “Oh, just looking to get to know the new talent. Don’t get me wrong, Rhys, you’ve done impressive things—Atlas was bottom-shelf before you came along. Nobody was expecting _that_ name to make a comeback.”

Rhys puffs up a little; he’s not ashamed to admit he’s proud of his company. “Well, I owe it all to my team. There’s a lot of great people at Atlas.” A lot of great people _behind_ Atlas, too, he doesn’t say, thinking of everyone he’d left behind on Pandora.

Longing hits him without warning. Rhys _misses_ that awful planet, misses it with his entire _being_ , as if all that violence and danger and Eridium dust has settled under his skin and made him a part of itself. He’d had to leave—Pandora hadn’t needed the new Atlas, any more than it had needed the old one—but that doesn’t make the fact of having gone any less wrenching. He misses the dust-haze horizon, the globular sky, the ragtag villages of people who have never even heard the words _equity interest;_ misses his friends most of all, Vaughn and Sasha and LB and Gortys, hell, even _August._ He’d give his right arm to be at a Purple Skag poker night now, tossing back shitawful shots and getting totally fleeced by the people he loves.

Of course, the person most likely to take him for all he’s worth isn’t there anymore, either. Fiona is out hunting Eridian ruins with Athena and Janey, traipsing across the six galaxies, and he knows that a Pandora without her wouldn’t be the same one he left.

Katagawa draws him back to the present with a dismissive wave. “Please. We both know who’s really behind a success like that—the _executives_.” _Must be a real hit with the employees,_ Rhys thinks. “Tell me, what made you choose Promethea as your headquarters? Brilliant PR move—the old king returns, well done—but the startup costs must have been astronomical.” Katagawa leans forward, smiling like the edge of a knife, eyes wide enough for the yellow _M_ stamped into his pupilless ECHOeye iris to show. “Lesser men wouldn’t have dared.”

Rhys leans back, just a little, abruptly wary. “Just the PR, like you said.” His gaze flicks to that black ECHOeye. It must have cost Katagawa a fortune; no eye can function without an aperture, yet all Rhys can catch is a minute shadow of movement, the eye’s surface restructuring itself so quickly that the lines of the _M_ remain unmarred. “My people ran the cost-benefit analysis and decided it was worth the risk. Worked out in the end.”

It’s a good lie, and simpler than the truth. Atlas had needed a headquarters, and Rhys had wanted to set down somewhere that Atlas could make a _difference_. He’d known by then that Pandora wasn’t the place for that sort of altruism: the planet had rejected every titan of industry that had dared to set foot on its surface, Atlas and Dahl and Hyperion all in a row, and he hadn’t been stupid enough to think he’d be exception. But there’d been plenty of other planets left shattered after the wars, and out of all of them it was Promethea that Old Atlas had broken, making it his responsibility. He’s the successor-in-interest, after all, taking on all of Atlas’s duties and obligations, no matter how hard.

That he’d known just what it was that Atlas had left _behind_ certainly hadn’t hurt.

“Hmm,” Katagawa says, leaning back. Rhys straightens too, resisting the urge to tug straight his lapels. “Well, suffice to say I’m impressed.” The smile brightens, stretching wider. “Say, how about we have dinner? There’s so _much_ we ought to talk about. Maliwan and Atlas could do great things together.”

“What?” Rhys says, thrown by the sudden shift. Given how this conversation began, he’s not sure how they’ve ended up at cooperation.

“I have a table reserved for tonight up at the Diamond Lounge,” Katagawa goes on, apparently oblivious to his confusion. “I’d love to discuss business further. There’s an opportunity here for both of us, Rhys—license agreements, that sort of thing . . .”

 _But you’re in charge of Stockpile Inventory,_ Rhys almost says, right before it hits him that Katagawa’s title doesn’t mean that he doesn’t talk to his _father_.

And an in with Katagawa Sr. would be a business opportunity of a lifetime, no matter how wary Rhys is of Maliwan’s domineering operating model. “ _Nnn_ ,” he says, and converts this with effort into, “okay.”

It’s only dinner, after all. What’s the worst that could happen?

*

He comes around to a monstrous headache and a body that feels leaden all over, like maybe someone’s turned up the gravity by several g’s.

For a moment he actually thinks that’s what’s happened— _those bastards in maintenance are really letting Helios go to shit_ —and then he peels his human eye open, and realizes that the light boring into his skull from his left is _sunlight_ , and that he’s not on Helios at all. Of course not; it’s been six years since Helios fell, and two since he left Pandora for more urbanized pastures, and—

The present clicks into place, a few disconcerting seconds too late. That’s right: he’s on Demophon for a conference, and this is his hotel room. His _very swanky_ hotel room, thank you, Lorelei, for the unmatched expertise in snagging top-of-the-line accommodations for cheap. Not that he _needs_ to be cheap, with how well Atlas’s stock is doing, but Rhys tries not to spend _too_ much on the company dime: the occasional first class seats and private limo, that’s enough for him. He’s practically a saint of frivolity.

Of course, saints probably don’t wake this hungover.

Rhys groans, and tries to recall last night, squinting blearily at the sun-spotted ceiling. The agony in his head is focused into a point of pressure behind his left eye, radiating outward, and it’s remarkably difficult to concentrate through the pulses of pain. He remembers the panels, and his run-in with Katagawa, and that bizarre invite to dinner—

“Oh, god,” he moans aloud, pressing his human hand to his face. The motion is sluggish, and so uncoordinated he nearly gives himself a black eye, but he’s too busy being appalled at his past self to care.

Had he really gone and said _yes?_

Why yes, his memory assures him, he had. There’d been that awkward elevator ride to the top of the hotel spire, after, Rhys thinking about how he owed it to Atlas’s shareholders to at least _try_ and fix getting off on the wrong foot; Katagawa had shifted into something approaching _amicable_ , and a shot at a licensing agreement with Maliwan had been too good to pass up. Rhys would rather a mutually profitable arrangement than a hostile competitor any day.

Based on how his head feels right now, he kind of wants to put R&D on building a time machine, just so he can go back in time and slap his past self. That dinner must have been one colossal failure, if he drank enough to forget it; he hasn’t been blackout drunk since _college_.

Except he _does_ remember the dinner, now that he thinks about it, even if some of the details are hazy. The restaurant had been the kind of high-end establishment that back in his Hyperion days would’ve made his bank account scream just from _thinking_ about it, and his dinner partner had been—

 _Really boring_ , actually?

Rhys can’t remember talking about licensing agreements at all. Somewhere along the line the topic of conversation had slid from the professional, and he hadn’t managed to reroute them back. Katagawa had done most of the talking, and under the insults and caustic exterior he’d mostly just turned out to be _dull._ Rhys is pretty sure his eyes had started to glaze over by the end of the first course; Katagawa had gone on and on about his yacht, and his siblings, and his siblings’ manifold faults . . . Rhys had refilled his own glass more times than was strictly appropriate for a business dinner, but surely not enough for _this._

He grinds the heel of his hand into his eye, and tries to scrounge together the night’s remainder. Somewhere around the second course they’d gotten into another argument, the pros and cons of Hyperion-style self-calibration, which had at least been _engaging._ He’d said something to make Katagawa laugh hard enough that his teeth flashed, and then—

And then nothing, as if his mental recording of the night has cut out. Katagawa’s laugh is vivid in his head, and right after that is a gaping blank hole, totally devoid of recollection. _File not found._

 _That_ wakes him right up.

Opening his eyes causes the headache to lance mercilessly through his skull, and that’s when Rhys makes another unpleasant discovery: his ECHOeye won’t focus, shifting between varying degrees of blur. _What the hell?_

He squeezes his right eye shut, and concentrates on getting the aperture to respond. This fails to accomplish anything besides exposing his eye to the light—the vindictive spike of his headache makes him whimper—so he tries summoning his self-diagnostic, instead, equally fruitless. The overlay flickers uncertainly before his vision, failing to resolve; almost like it’s not registering his commands, dead connection.

_Oh, shit._

A cold clamminess settles in his gut, and Rhys takes to checking himself over in earnest, then, starting with his robotic arm. Getting it mobile proves to be a challenge: his hand-eye coordination is totally shot, and drastically worse in the cybernetic limb. It takes several tries just to lift his hand high enough to watch himself totally bomb the basic test of flipping it palm-up, and he’s sufficiently attached to his nose being intact that he doesn’t even try to bring his fingers to touch it.

Which, okay, that’s _pretty bad._ He sits up—

—which just about _kills him_ , judging by how it feels, the room spinning wildly—

—and manages to manually activate his palm display, prodding clumsily at it with his left hand. Swiping through his contacts feels like it takes every last brain cell he’s currently got online, and he maybe kind of forgets to breathe in the process, but after a few tense moments he finds the contact card he needs. He punches in _The Most Kickass Assistant EVER!!_ , audio-only, and falls back against the bed.

Three shrill tones later he’s greeted by Lorelei’s groggy voice: “Whozzit—ugh, ’course it’s you. D’you have any idea what time it is here?”

“Nuh,” Rhys tries, and fails, to convert from Celeus to Meridian time in his head. “Ear . . . ly?”

“Arse o’clock,” says Lorelei flatly, “it’s arse o’clock, Rhys. This better be good.” A yawn spills over the uplink. “If this is another tie coordination crisis, ’m hanging up.”

“No ties,” he says, quickly, and presses his human hand to his forehead again, as if he might be able to push the throbbing pain back down to reasonable levels. “I mean, I’m a little worried about that chartreuse number, but— _no no no, wait, don’t hang up,_ ” as Lorelei makes noises to the effect of _’kay, ’bye_ , “I, uh, think I was drugged?”

“Drugged?!” Her voice jumps an octave on the word, slicing through his head like an overzealous sushi chef. (He double-checks himself on the pronoun, but it is _her_ , this week; he remembers Lorelei telling him so before he left.) “What _happened?_ Are you okay? Where are you?”

Rhys answers the only question out of the three that he can. “My hotel room.” His ECHOeye chooses that moment to make another wrenching focal adjustment, making him wince. “Can’t . . . remember what happened, but my cybernetics are pretty jacked. Might be the drugs, I dunno.” With effort, he pieces together, “Need you to get down to headquarters. Start an all-systems security sweep.”

“Holy shit.” He can hear a rustling on the other end of the line, Lorelei shoving up out of bed. “You think they got access through you somehow? Got into our systems?”

“Don’t know, but I’d rather not wait to find out.” He sounds like he’s drunk, sentence cogency backsliding perilously. “Gotta . . . find Zer0. Figure out if there’s security footage, or . . . something.” Rhys has a sick feeling that he already knows who’s behind his current predicament, but he’s going to need Zer0 to find out for sure.

A new and distressing thought strikes him. What if Zer0’s not there? Are they back from that job—was there ever even a real job in the first place? What if it was just a ruse to get his bodyguard out of the way?

As an idea, it makes a horrible amount of sense. “Crap,” says Rhys, and ignores the inquiring sound from Lorelei, panic mounting. Zer0’s okay, right? Even if the job _was_ a trap, they’re strong enough to fight their way out. They’re strong enough for _anything_ , never mind some rent-a-cop Maliwan goons—unless Katagawa shelled out for some _serious_ bad guys, which would’ve probably cost him less than that fancy eye . . . _Please be okay,_ Rhys thinks desperately, and twists around to reach his right palm with his left hand. He struggles through pulling up the display, and sends Zer0 a textless ping.

To his immense relief, the reply arrives almost at once. A text box pops up over his hand, together with a location flag confirming Zer0 is back at the hotel:

`A late start today`  
`Midday was some time ago`  
`Shall I come by now?`

“Thank god,” Rhys mutters, and types back,

`yes come here need help`

Then he shifts his attention back to Lorelei, who’s repeating his name in a tone of concern. “Sorry, I was—Zer0 wasn’t with me last night, I was worried . . . anyway, they’re fine. On their way. You’ll get security going, right?”

“I’m on it. Where was Zer0? They should’ve been with you.” Something scuffs against the audio pickup, like maybe Lorelei’s shoved her ECHO between shoulder and ear while she yanks on her boots. Her _shit-kicking boots_ , she’d once explained, when Rhys had made a noise of surprise at the spiked combat leather. “Scratch that, tell me later. Just get ’em to run a medscan on you ASAP, yeah? I’ll ring you once I’ve woken up the security boffins.”

“Thanks, Lorelei.”

“Lorelei out.”

Rhys breathes a sigh of relief. It’s _amazing_ , having competent help: kind of like having a high-end hacking suite for an arm. (Lorelei’s name in his contacts is her own doing, but it’s also totally true. Privately, Rhys thinks the version she’d tried to input originally— _My Super Badass Assistant Who Keeps This Company Afloat_ , thwarted only by the character limit _—_ had been right on the money, too.)

He contemplates the prospect of sitting up again while he waits for Zer0, without favor. The pain behind his eye has intensified, and it feels like if he doesn’t focus on breathing he might pass out again.

 _Goddamn_ Katagawa.

*

He’s just managed to scoot far enough down the bed to kick his feet down to the carpet when there’s a knock at the door. “Zer0?” he calls.

Their modulated voice filters mutedly from the other side. “Yes, Rhys.”

“Oh, finally. Get in here, please.”

There’s a clatter, like maybe Zer0’s struggling with the keycard reader—something about that makes Rhys want to laugh, that even a badass cyber-ninja is no match for your average hotel door—and then the lock disengages, Zer0 stepping smoothly inside. Their movement is fluid enough to make Rhys feel sluggish on a good day, and right now it makes him feel like he’s underwater, hauling himself around in slow motion.

That’s all right, though. If Zer0’s moving with their typical deadly grace then they’re okay, and nothing bad happened last night.

Zer0 approaches, starting, “Here to assist you,” before stopping short. A red exclamation point flashes over their helm. “Rhys! What happened?”

Shocking Zer0 enough to break them out of haiku, Rhys thinks dizzily, there’s something he’s never done before—should he be proud, or ashamed? “Uh, I think I’ve been drugged?” The single exclamation point turns into a distressed three; definitely _ashamed._ “I’m okay! I think. Uh. Could you help me with the medscanner? In my luggage.” Rhys waves vaguely in the direction of his suitcase, lying open under the window.

Zer0 obeys at once, going to rifle tensely through the contents. “I should not have left,” they say. “I knew the hotel held risks. / Who did this to you?”

“I, uh, have some suspicions. Medscan first, okay?” Slowly, trying to reduce how angry this will make his headache, Rhys levers himself up to sitting. “You didn’t—run into any trouble last night, did you?” The pain behind his eye _throbs;_ he grits his teeth.

“A mere wild goose chase. / Disappointed by the lack / of a proper kill.” The accompanying holograph is hard to see from this angle, but Rhys is pretty sure the face that flits across the helm is a frown.

“Oh,” he says, with a gust of relief. “Good! I mean, uh, that sucks.” He clears his throat.

Zer0 locates the scanner, then comes to stand before him, pausing to take him in. Rhys wonders how he looks; if it’s anything like how he feels, it’s probably not reassuring.

Whatever they see, they don’t comment, only flipping the scanner on. “Hold still while it runs / then tell me what has transpired.” A threatening pause. “I will wreak vengeance.”

“No vengeance!” says Rhys. “Yet. Once I’m sure of what happened last night, then by all means, vengeance away.” He holds still, and Zer0 moves the gimmick from the top of his head down to his feet, a red scan field from the device scrolling over his body. When it’s finished they hand Rhys the device, and he presses the pad of his thumb into a recess along one side, wincing at the immediate sting of the needle. “ _Ouch._ ”

“Don’t be a baby. / It is only a flesh wound. / This is important.” The modulation hides any emotion that might be present in Zer0’s voice, but Rhys can practically feel their concern radiating in his direction.

“I know,” he mumbles, and sticks the finger in his mouth.

Both of them wait in silence as the device completes its analysis. Rhys tilts his head carefully left, then right, trying to work out the stiffness without triggering another wash of pain in his head. He doesn’t succeed—the throb increases savagely—but his neck does ache a little less, so under the circumstances he’s willing to call it a win.

The medscanner beeps, displaying the results.

Rhys swears.

Zer0’s helm displays a red question mark, and Rhys growls, “ _GHB!_ That bastard dosed me with a fucking _date rape drug_.” Somewhere under his indignation his rational brain is relieved, because at least it’s not something worse: GHB will clear his system within 24 hours, per the scanner, and it’s better than the nightmare scenario he’d concocted of some nanite virus designed to eat away at his cybernetic connections. At the visceral surface, though, he’s pissed, humiliated and hurt. How could he have been so stupid?

(Deep in his head, a nasty voice says, _All that blood money wasn’t enough to buy you some brains, huh, kiddo?)_

“Who,” Zer0 says dangerously, and Rhys realizes he can’t put off owning up about how he got into this mess. He bends forward, and pinches the bridge of his nose.

“I kind of—went to dinner? Last night.” He can feel Zer0’s blank stare, even without looking up. (That is, obviously it’s a blank stare—it’s not like Zer0 is capable of any other kind—but this one feels particularly devoid of inflection.) “With Maliwan’s Head of Stockpile Inventory. Katagawa Junior.”

Another vivid red exclamation point. “A dangerous choice / to dine alone with Junior. / That one’s a real snake.”

“Yeah,” sighs Rhys, “I got that impression from the way he talked about his family. Like they were, I don’t know, _corporate competition_. I was half expecting him to ask if I’d like to take them off his hands. But I didn’t think—damn it,” he looks away, feeling the flush creep up his neck, “I didn’t think I was walking into _this._ ” Before Zer0 can respond, he goes on, “Look, we need to know for sure. That’s why I called you. My ECHOeye’s not working—I’m guessing that’s because things on the organic side are kind of scrambled, so I should be able to get it calibrated later, but in the meantime I can’t get at the hotel security footage myself. I obviously didn’t get back to this room on my own.”

“Consider it done,” Zer0 says, without hesitation. “The halls here have many eyes / easily emptied.”

They give him a final glance—at least, Rhys assumes that’s what they’re doing—and then fade out of view with a brief shimmer, because Rhys has a veritable fucking _badass_ working for him as a bodyguard, and one that knows how to make a dramatic exit to boot.

The effect is slightly spoiled by the door opening a moment later, but he’s not going to hold that against them.

Rhys flops back on the bed, and waits for them to come back.

*

Zer0 returns some thirty minutes later, by which time Rhys has successfully transposed himself into the chair beside the room’s comconsole. He’s slid so low in the chair that his chin nearly rests on his chest, but he stirs at the opening of the door. “Any luck?”

“It was a success.” Zer0 strides up to him, presenting him with a thumb drive. “The security footage / from the halls without.”

Rhys takes it gingerly with his fingers, feeling like he’s accepting a live snake. “Right. Okay. Here we go.” He pulls himself grudgingly upright, and hesitates over the jack embedded in the table.

Zer0 must take his dithering for discomfort at their presence, because they say, “Shall I remain here? / This is a private affair. / I can wait outside.”

“Um,” Rhys says, and thinks it over. This is humiliating enough as it is, and he wouldn’t normally want an audience while witnessing an ungraceful moment, much less one he doesn’t even remember, but—“No, stick around. Maybe you’ll see something I won’t.” Yeah, he’s gonna go with that. Zer0’s the kind of super-spy that most people think only exists in ECHOcasts, and Rhys wants them watching his back, even in this.

Zer0 nods, stepping back to stand at his shoulder as Rhys boots up the console. He’s pulled a ViperDrive out of his luggage while they were out, and he sticks it into the read slot, waiting for it to establish a secure connection. It’s a neat trick: instant virtual desktop infrastructure, firewalled from the physical machine and tied to any Atlas servers in-range. Just now the only thing within range is Rhys’s ECHOeye, but that’s fine: he has the basic setup stored on his integrated chip for precisely this sort of emergency. The ViperDrive prompts him for a password, which Rhys inputs one-handed, doubly frustrating given that usually he can do this part with his _brain._

A stylized Atlas _A_ appears on screen, and Rhys connects the thumb drive.

He sees at once that Zer0’s pulled all the CCTV recordings from the floor, so he selects the one at the top of the list, meaning to go through them all. It opens to show video from a camera situated at the end of the hall, looking down at the marbled elevator foyer.

Rhys scrolls rapidly through the footage, Zer0 alert at his shoulder. Early on he sees both of them wander past under the camera, the tiny Rhys on the screen gesturing excitedly with his robotic hand; he’d been telling Zer0 something about that nanobot panel he’d been so hot to see, and Zer0 had been just as inscrutable then as they are beside him now.

Camera-Rhys and Zer0 disappear into the elevator, and Rhys keeps scrolling through the footage, keeping an eye on the timestamp in the lower left corner. The number is getting late, but that last panel had run well into the evening, and the part of the dinner that he recalls feels substantial. He must have spent at least a couple hours up in the Diamond Lounge with Katagawa, giving Junior plenty of opportunities to sneak him that GHB.

In the video, the elevator foyer grows empty, the timestamp inching towards midnight. Rhys feels a growing lump in his throat.

He’s just scrolled past the start of Demophon’s planetary cycle when the elevator doors open. Two people exit; one has a bright red cybernetic arm, and the other—

Rhys sucks in a breath. That’s Katagawa, all right: sleek and slender in his orange-and-black, standing up straight while Rhys slumps bonelessly against his side. Camera-Rhys looks authentically drunk, his human arm hooked around Katagawa’s neck, and Katagawa guides him off the elevator, careful to keep him from falling. Camera-Rhys is moving his feet, but he’s stumbling, moving slow—if it weren’t for the trace GHB in his system Rhys could almost believe that the version of him up on screen is just shitfaced, and that Katagawa really had just been helping him back to his room.

He knows better, though, and he hurries to pull up the next file as the figures step out of view. (Chances are he won’t find anything else—whatever Katagawa did, surely he did it elsewhere—but he needs to check.) Rhys jumps to the appropriate timestamp, and finds himself and Katagawa passing through the camera’s view, then again in the next file. Skipping to the same time in the following file shows his hotel room door, and Rhys’s chest tightens. Probably that’s all there is; probably they’ll have to break into the building’s central security in the vain hope that whatever Katagawa did he did before taking Rhys back, and ultimately never find out at all.

But Katagawa doesn’t stop at Rhys’s door, and keeps moving out of the frame.

Rhys sits bolt upright. His head protests, and he can feel Zer0 start beside him, but he ignores both: pulls up the next video, and has a weird moment of disorientation when he can’t find himself or Katagawa at the right time. He skips to the next recording, and realizes that the reason he’s lost them is because Katagawa has turned into the hallway nook situated across from Rhys’s door, a tiny cutout of wall that’s probably there to let service carts past each other. Katagawa levers him down to the floor, propping him to sit against the wall, and comes down on one knee before him.

The camera is located above and behind Katagawa, so Rhys can’t see his face, only his own. The version of him on screen is slumped heavily sideways, gone fully unconscious, and in the present Rhys holds his breath. He’s watching Katagawa’s hands, caught by the sour fear that he’s about to see Katagawa reach for his face, or maybe his belt; he wouldn’t have pegged Katagawa as the type to fuck someone while they’re passed out, but then, he hadn’t pegged Katagawa as being the sort of guy who drugs a rival CEO at a conference, either. Maybe he’s just as wrong about this.

But Katagawa’s hand goes only to his own pocket. Rhys exhales.

His relief lasts only as long as it takes for Katagawa to withdraw the flash drive, its metal connector catching the hallway light.

Rhys feels abruptly sick.

He’s dimly aware that he’s dug the nails of his left hand into the plastic armrest of the chair, a dull ache settling into his fingers. Zer0 shifts tensely beside him, but Rhys doesn’t look towards them: he’s tunneled in on the recording, staring despite the strain of his unfocused eye.

On the screen, Katagawa brings his left hand up to the unconscious Rhys’s face, angling his head upright. It’s a weirdly intimate gesture, doubly so given the care Katagawa takes to brush Rhys’s hair away from his port; camera-Rhys doesn’t react to the hand in his hair, but watching it makes Rhys shudder, disturbed. There’s something about that touch that’s too careful, too gentle, and the sight of it twists wrong in his gut.

There’s nothing gentle about the way Katagawa plugs the drive into Rhys’s skull, shifting his grip to hold him in place and then jacking it firmly in.

Camera-Rhys jerks so sharply that Rhys thinks he’s about to go into convulsions. His back arches, head banging against the wall—Rhys resists the urge to feel the back of his own skull for bruises—and Katagawa grabs both sides of his head to keep him still. A moment later camera-Rhys relaxes; his eyes open, unfocused, the pupil of his human eye blown while the ECHOeye is all iris. The ECHOeye lights suddenly up, its circuits blazing silver, and Katagawa releases him and sits back, no doubt guiding the progress of what’s happening with his own ECHOeye.

Rhys is coiled so tense from watching Katagawa _hack into his brain_ that he jumps when Zer0 touches his arm. “Holy shit,” he gasps, breaking away from the screen.

“Rhys,” they say.

“I’m all right,” Rhys lies. He tries for a smile, which probably turns out wan and unconvincing. “This is a little disturbing to watch, that’s all.” His gaze slides back to the recording.

Something happens on screen. Camera-Rhys’s ECHOeye flickers, blinking momentarily yellow, and in the present Rhys’s left hand clenches into a fist, because _yeah, take that, you bastard_. “He just hit my internal firewall,” he explains to Zer0, and hisses with satisfaction as Katagawa lets go of his past self. Katagawa’s hands move like he’s manipulating a display only he can see, and camera-Rhys’s eye goes yellow again, glowing steady. Now-Rhys bites his tongue, and waits with more than a little trepidation to see what happens next.

If Katagawa managed to break into his core systems, then all of Atlas’s secrets, all of _Rhys’s_ secrets, are in enemy hands. If the firewall was enough to stop him it’s still bad—Katagawa will have skimmed his recent memory, duplicated everything in his integrated cache—but nowhere near the same level of company-decimating catastrophe. He’ll have to change a lot of passwords, abandon some projects, but Atlas will stay in one piece.

Damn it, all that legacy code from Jack has to be good for _something._

And—it _is_ , Rhys sees a moment later. Katagawa’s right hand curls into a fist, making a furious downward motion. He hesitates, and then his shoulders slump, like he’s conceding defeat. “ _Yeah_ ,” Rhys says fiercely, “you bet I can take on a little malware.” Under his breath, he adds, “State-of-the-art.”

Katagawa sits back on his heels, considering. Rhys can see the exact moment he makes up his mind: he sighs, and then reaches forward to yank the drive back out of Rhys’s head. Camera-Rhys goes ragdoll-limp as it disconnects, any illusion of self-possession departing him along with it.

Rhys thinks, very clearly, that he _never wants to see that again._

Katagawa pockets the drive, and sets about pulling Rhys to his feet. As soon as they leave the frame Rhys skips back to the previous recording, finding them quickly now that he knows what timestamp to look for. Katagawa hauls him towards the room door, pausing only to fish Rhys’s keycard out of his pockets; takes Rhys inside, and—to Rhys’s silent relief—steps out barely a minute later, glancing down the hall before striding off in the other direction.

Rhys lets out a long breath, and sits back in his chair.

Several seconds pass in dense silence. Then Zer0 says, “He will be hunted. / Katagawa will learn what / guards the Atlas mind.”

“I’d say he already did,” Rhys says, but the protest is weak. Maybe his firewall has fended Katagawa off, but he’d still gotten _in_ , gotten to Rhys, and that burns, acrid blend of embarrassment and vulnerability. His shoulders slouch. “I, ah . . . I’m thinking I’d better ramp up my personal security.” He looks over at Zer0, trying for another grin.

To his surprise, they look away, posture stiff. “A grievous error / to leave my charge unguarded. / You are my duty.”

Rhys straightens at once. “Hey, no! No way this one’s on you. You’re not required to accompany me on business dinners, especially when I didn’t ask. This fuckup was one hundred percent Rhys Strongfork original.” _And a classic one, too,_ sneers the little voice in his head, the one that narrates all of his screw-ups and always sounds a little too much like Handsome Jack. “Besides, they probably don’t allow ninjas into the Diamond Lounge.”

The emoticon holograph that flickers across Zer0’s faceplate is distinctly unhappy. “The matter is not / one of mere obligation. / It is of value.”

“What? You’re gonna have to help me out with that one.” Rhys frowns. “Too cryptic for us engineers, we’re barely literate, you know.”

“Value defines you. / You are incomparable. / Lesser tasks can wait.”

“Oh,” says Rhys.

And blushes furiously, because, well: that’s not really the sort of thing he normally expects to hear from Zer0, even if they are his best bro. “Wow. That’s actually—really sweet? Thanks, Zer0.” And, in hurried addition, “But it really isn’t your fault, okay? Even if you hadn’t had your thing, I would’ve told you to take the night off.”

“For a CEO / you are much too forgiving. / I will do better.”

Rhys sighs, and scrubs his hands—damn it, his _hand_ , his robotic arm still too sluggish to join the motion—over his face. “No, I was an idiot. I should’ve known better than to think a rival exec could be after anything but our corporate secrets.” Which sounds like something Jack would say, enough that Rhys can practically hear him now: _Toldja, didn’t I, kiddo? Can’t trust anyone in this ugly universe but yourself._

He bites down hard on the inside of his cheek, pushing the thought away. Rhys _can_ trust people: _his_ people, Atlas, his friends. He can certainly trust Zer0, and should clearly trust them with his safety more often, because they’re much better at keeping him out of harm’s way than he is himself.

Aloud, he says, “We’d better get the footage from the rest of this place, just in case. I doubt Katagawa did anything else, but I don’t want to leave the possibility open, and there’s always the chance we’ll find something useful.” He unplugs the thumb drive, holding it back out to Zer0. “If you don’t mind? I need to, _ugh_ , get my diagnostics online. In case Katagawa left me any other nasty surprises.”

“No corner exempted. / We will know all who passed through.” Zer0 accepts the drive with a decisive nod. “I have my bro’s back.”

“I know you do,” Rhys says, smiling crooked, and watches them go. He slumps in his chair as soon as the door closes, feeling like he’s been drained to the dregs.

His ECHO display is still unresponsive, and he can already tell it’s going to be a struggle getting any of his diagnostics online. _At least you don’t have to rebuild it from scratch, this time. And you’re not even an abandoned underground bunker! So many upsides, over here._

Rhys grimaces, and gets to work.

*

An hour of concerted effort finally persuades his ECHOeye to cooperate, allowing Rhys to boot the self-diagnostic. Once that’s up and running he dissipates the overlay, and lies back on the bed with the intention of catching some additional sleep. This is going to take a while, and at least this way he’ll metabolize the remainder of the drug faster.

Lorelei calls just as he’s drifting off, reporting that she’s gotten things rolling with Cybersecurity. Somewhere deep in the bowels of Atlas his best infosec guys are running a grand-scale version of the same systems sweep he’s doing inside his own head, much of Atlas’s immense processing power reallocated to picking over every inch of the internal network. They’ll check for signs of infiltration and update security protocols as they go, and once the sweep is concluded everything will be airtight. It’s wasteful, and every minute that Atlas’s colossal brain is occupied by something other than propelling humanity into the future costs him money, but Rhys doesn’t care about that. Maybe he’s thrifty when it comes to hotels, but the integrity of his data is sacrosanct; he’ll spare no expense keeping Atlas’s innards out of competitor hands.

He trusts Lorelei didn’t tell the infosec geeks that the reason they’re having to divert the better portion of Atlas’s resources is their very own CEO. He’d rather not be made laughingstock in front of his team.

Once she finishes delivering her report she asks how he’s doing, and Rhys answers truthfully—“Feels like I’ve been run over”—which at least makes him sound suitably pitiable before he tells her what they’ve found out. “Tell the Intel spooks it should be all eyes on Maliwan. If anything’s left our servers, that’s where it ended up.”

“You found the culprit?”

“Yeah,” Rhys sighs, staring grimly up at the ceiling. His ECHOeye still isn’t focusing properly, but the eye strain isn’t as bad as it was an hour ago. “Katagawa Junior, Maliwan’s Head of Stockpile Inventory.”

“That manky git? _Fucking_ hell.”

“Wait, what do you know about him?”

“Enough to know he’s one nasty bloke. Mindy in Accounting—you remember her from the staff party? Blue hair, talked your ear off about third quarter profits?—used to work for him, back before the Maliwan barcoding debacle.” Rhys nearly grins at the reminder of Maliwan’s bungled rollout of employee barcodes; some of Maliwan’s hottest talent had jumped ship the moment they got wind of full-time employee tracking, and many of them had been scooped up by Atlas. “Said he was a spoiled trust fund brat with no scruples, ambitions _way_ above his station. _No_ compunctions about cutting down anyone who got in his way, so long as there was a chance it would impress his daddy. ’Course, in Mindy’s view those were his upsides—she hitched her wagon to him for a reason, y’know?—but he’s _definitely_ bad news.”

“No kidding.” Rhys winces, and gives her the rundown.

When he’s finished, Lorelei sounds stunned. “ _Wow_. Okay, that’s—kind of awful. Jesus, Rhys.” He readies himself for the ribbing of a lifetime, or else a well-deserved reaming for being terminally irresponsible, but she only says, “Are you, like, okay? Y’know, not—physically.”

“Of course I’m okay,” he laughs, awkward. “Why wouldn’t I be okay? I just got taken to dinner by a creep that wanted to hack my brain, drugged to the eyeballs, and my recent memory stolen. Usual stuff for the CEO of a rising company, right?”

“Look, I’m just saying, if you want to—I don’t know, talk about it, or something, I’m here for it, okay? I’ll listen to whatever, and not just ’cause you’re my boss.”

Rhys swallows roughly. “Okay.”

They talk for a little while after that, then wrap up, Rhys drifting off into fitful sleep. He dreams of his own eye lighting up yellow, and someone’s presence filling his head like an electrical buzz, not knowing whether’s it Katagawa or Jack.

When Zer0 rouses him again Demophon’s sun has sunk low against the horizon, the light filtering through the window tinged a deep orange. Rhys’s diagnostic is nearly done, and Zer0 informs him that they’ve finished sucking out the hotel’s security footage, as well as that the chartered chauffeur hired to deliver them back to the shuttleport has arrived. “Time to depart from / this distant dangerous world. / Shall I help you rise?”

“Ngh,” groans Rhys. “I think I can swing getting upright.” The extra sleep has at least taken the edge off his headache, and he accomplishes getting ambulatory on his own. The prospect of gathering his things from around the room is more daunting, but once he’s up on his feet he sees that Zer0’s taken care of that, too.

“Zer0,” Rhys says, sincerely, “you’re the best thing that ever happened to me.” He pauses, leaning on the back of the desk chair—will you look at that, his robotic arm is responding again, hallelujah—and adds, “Maybe don’t tell Lorelei I said that, though, ’cause I kinda told her the same thing? I mean, you’re _both_ the best thing that ever happened to me. I don’t know what I’d do without you.”

“Get kidnapped daily / and miss most of your meetings,” Zer0 deadpans, but their next words bear an audible warmth. “Glad to be here too, Rhys.”

Rhys smiles at that, and allows himself to be ushered downstairs and out to the valet rotunda. Zer0 spots their chauffeur, and gets the both of them—plus Rhys’s luggage, plus their own sword—bundled into the back, where Rhys is able to lean back and stare glassily out the window. He watches the shimmer of downtown Celeus crawl by as they pull out of the hotel rotunda, and thinks about the amount of infosec cleanup awaiting him when he gets home.

They’ve just made their way out onto the groundcar freeway when his self-diagnostic completes, proclaiming him clean—

—and his ECHOcomm rings, making both him and Zer0 start. Caller ID shows an unknown number and a request for holo-display, and Rhys exchanges bemused looks with Zer0—sort of; their faceplate blinks a question mark, anyway—before accepting the call. He rests his right hand palm-up on his knee to project a holo of whoever is on the line, and waits as the pixels flow together to form a wireframe bust, the caller’s image mapping rapidly onto the shape.

When it’s done Rhys nearly tries to fling the hologram away from himself. Staring up at him in light yellow miniature is Katagawa Jr., smiling an appalling sharp smile. Rhys snarls, “You!” and leans in towards the holo, anger sparking in his chest. “Of course you have my secure line, you bastard. What the hell do you want?”

“Now, now, let’s be civil,” says Katagawa, in a tone so mild that it’s surely calculated to be infuriating. “I just wanted to have a chat in follow-up to our little date. How’s that drug hangover, buddy? Nothing important broken?”

“You—you—” Rhys sputters. He’s so angry he can barely form sentences, let alone come up with a scathing retort. “I can’t believe you did that to me,” falls out of his mouth, “and then had the nerve to _call._ You ever come near Atlas again and I’ll—I’ll—”

“Sputter at me ineffectually?” asks Katagawa, and, as Rhys continues to do exactly that, “Look, I’m calling because I’ve gone through all the nice little files I pulled from your head, and I’m convinced. Atlas is hot! You’ve really turned this company around, and it’s starting to look like the kind of intellectual real estate we’d really like to bring into the family.”

Across from Rhys, Zer0 flashes a holograph of a question mark and exclamation point pushed together. Rhys’s face must be doing more or less the same thing, because Katagawa says,

“No need to look so shocked, Rhys! I know you’re proud of what Atlas has accomplished, and you should be. It’s a real achievement. But you’re in the big leagues now, and you won’t be able to survive the harsh world at the top without an experienced hand—a _parent’s_ hand, to shelter your burgeoning company from the heavy-hitters that are starting to take note of your market share. Maliwan is prepared to be that hand.”

If that sleazy smile grows any wider, Rhys thinks, it’s going to crawl right off Katagawa’s stupid face. He finally manages to draw a full breath, and spends it on an explosive, “ _What?”_

“Was I not clear? Too many mixed metaphors? Ah, well. I’m proposing a merger, Rhys. Maliwan would like to acquire your corporation, turn Atlas into one of our branded subsidiaries. You get money in the bank, we get your clever little self-aiming tech in our portfolio, and we all clock out to party on the Zanara.” Katagawa’s lilting emphasis turns the word into _Za-na-ra_ , falsely lascivious. “We’ll take care of everything, and you can be Vice President of Beach Drinks, how’s that sound?”

Rhys’s apoplectic rage, which had been building towards some distant out-of-sight climax, suddenly punches into the stratosphere. He hisses, “ _Eat shit, Katagawa,_ ” venomous, barely recognizing his own voice. “You drugged me and _hacked into my brain_ to steal my company’s secrets, and now you think I’m just going to _hand it over?”_ He bares his teeth, anger cresting into something so totally visceral it loops back around into out-of-body experience. It feels like going feral. Katagawa’s image quivers over his palm, the surge of adrenaline making Rhys shake. “You can take Atlas _over my dead body._ ”

For a moment Katagawa actually looks surprised, and Rhys nearly hangs up on him just for that—had he really expected Rhys to just _roll over?_ —but then the bastard smiles again, his grin spreading sly and horrible across his face. “But Rhys,” Katagawa says, in the tones of one helpfully concerned, “don’t you want to be there when Maliwan opens the vault?”

Rhys freezes.

Cold fear washes out anger in less time than it takes for his heart to pump another dose of oxygen through him. A knot forms in his gut, and he hears himself say, “What?” as though from a great distance.

“Oh,” laughs Katagawa, “did you think I wouldn’t pick up on that? Rhys, Rhys, Rhys.” His smile remains steady, and he brings up a hand to tap his temple, opposite from the side bearing his own port. “When your firewall forced me out I thought I’d be making off with small stuff, but this—talk about a bombshell! The board of directors will be _so_ pleased. A vault, just waiting to be opened, right underneath Atlas—you sly dog!”

 _How,_ Rhys thinks, horrified, and gets a sinking feeling that he already knows. Maybe Atlas’s encrypted research on the vault and key isn’t floating around in his recent memory, but the temple underneath Apollyon Station is often enough on his mind, permeating his dreams. It’s not a stretch for Katagawa to have found it in the surface-level data he’d been able to reach.

There is—Rhys realizes with a sudden, horrible clarity—no way Maliwan is backing off now.

Maybe that’s why he says, “You can’t,” sucking in a breath. “Listen to me, Atlas or no Atlas, you can’t open the vault. It’s under a populated area, for god’s sake!”

He’s had nightmares about it. (He wants them to only be nightmares, because the other possibility is too terrifying to even consider.) The dream is always the same: in it he descends the excavated tunnel to the basilica, and sets an object he doesn’t recognize on the pedestal before the gate. He can’t stop his feet on the way down, or turn away once he’s there; watches each time as the gate flares eridium-violet overhead, waking him on the cry of something ancient and angry reverberating from within.

As nightmares go it shares some obvious base components with the ones he has about Jack, which makes it easier to pretend that that’s all it is. But Rhys has been to Pandora, and he’s opened the Vault of the Traveler, and at the end of the day—and usually it _is_ at the end of the day, the light of Promethea’s star no longer there to ward off his darker thoughts—he knows better. The vault underneath Apollyon Station is calling to him, telling him what it wants him to do, and if he isn’t extraordinarily careful he’ll find himself standing in the basilica, slotting the key into place.

Katagawa shrugs, “Collateral damage,” yanking Rhys’s attention back to the present. “Well within the acceptable limits, given the value of whatever’s inside. A pristine, unopened vault—it must be bristling with Eridian tech! Think about it, Rhys. You, me, Maliwan’s resources and transgalactic reach—we’ll have that baby popped open in no time, and live like kings for the rest of our lives.”

Panic tightens Rhys’s chest, the passenger compartment surely shrinking around him. “I’m serious, Katagawa. Whatever’s in there isn’t worth the risk. It could blow away everyone on the planet, for all we know. It wouldn’t even be the first time.” He’s spent a lot of money on finding out what happened with the other vaults, and he’s pretty sure that a vault is the reason there’s a _crack in Pandora’s moon_.

“Well, then, we’ll just have to be off-planet when it opens, won’t we? Really, Rhys. Such a bleeding heart.” Katagawa raises an ironic brow; _Probably practiced that in the mirror_ , thinks Rhys belligerently. “A merger, Rhys. Think it over. Maliwan will get what it wants, one way or another, but I’d much rather bring you into the family without having to crush you under my heel. We’d make such excellent partners.” Katagawa smiles again, wide enough to show teeth. “Next time you’d like to do dinner, just give me a call!”

And dissipates from the uplink, leaving Rhys open-mouthed.

When he finally gets his tongue working again all he can manage is, “That slimy—Maliwan— _bastard!_ ‘Next time?!’ I oughta—he thinks he can— _screw him!”_ He glowers down at his empty palm, and tells the empty space where Katagawa’s smug face isn’t, “I’ll show _you_ , you spoiled trust fund brat! You wouldn’t last a week before running to daddy!” Rhys’s robotic hand closes into a fist, punching down into the seat. “ _Damn_ it! _That’s_ what I should have said to him.”

Zer0 is still sitting motionless across from him. “I will separate / his foul head from his shoulders,” they say, deadly cool. “But we have new risks.”

Thinking about what Katagawa’s made off with evaporates his anger just as swiftly as before. Rhys sinks bonelessly down in his seat, and moans, “Oh, Zer0, what did I _do_ ,” both hands coming up to his face.

“It is not your fault. / Katagawa plays dirty. / You could not have known.”

“No, it is. I let him get to me—let him find out about the Vault, and now he’s gonna come after Atlas—Maliwan has an army, do you think that’s what he meant by ‘one way or another’? Oh, no. Oh, god.” Rhys sits up, and tries not to hyperventilate. “Atlas doesn’t even _have_ a corporate force. I can’t defeat Maliwan with a bunch of office employees! He has Valkyries, Zer0, I have Scrum Teams! _Scrum Teams with agoraphobia!_ Half of my R&D division won’t go out in the courtyard for lunch because they’re afraid of bees!” Okay, _definitely_ hyperventilating. “Promethea _doesn’t even have bees!”_

“Rhys, do not panic.” Zer0’s voice is steady as ever, but then, what’s a Maliwan army to a dubiously-human cyber-assassin? “You will make Atlas ready. / We will fight him back.”

“It’s not—it’s the _planet_ , Zer0.” Rhys gulps down a huge breath, trying to slow his wheezing. “You’ve seen what the Corporate Wars did to the headquarter worlds. I can’t let that happen. Not to Promethea, not because of Atlas.” He bends forward, human hand grasping his hair while the right one fists beside his temple. “I watched this documentary about Tantalus, once”—no need to bring up that he’d done it because he wanted to learn more about the homeworld of his then-hero—“about what happened there after the Crimson Lance went toe-to-toe with Vladof in the Last Corporate War. It was _ugly_.”

There’s a motion that Rhys’s eye doesn’t quite catch, and an instant later Zer0 is sitting beside him, their slender three-fingered hand coming to grip his shoulder. “The choice is not yours,” they say, not unkindly. “All you can do is prepare. / Protect those you love.”

Rhys’s answering laugh is more than a little hysterical. “Guess he really sorted out Atlas’s priorities for the next quarter for me, huh? Forget robotics, put your money into planetary defenses, baby! If you haven’t sprinted to deliver reactive orbital bombardment shielding on an enemy timetable, have you really even sprinted . . . ?” He uncurls, slumping back against the seat with his head tipped back. “God, I can just see the RIDAs now. ‘Risk: if you don’t make this sprint deadline, _everybody_ dies . . .’”

“Not with you in charge. / Promethea will not fall. / Both of us will help.”

“Shit, I still gotta tell Lorelei. And here I thought I was through with telling her bad news.” Rhys powers on his palm display with a flick of his wrist, automatic, still staring up at the roof.

Zer0’s hand drops to his arm before he can place the call. “You ought to rest now. / There will be time to tell her.” Their faceplate remains blank, but Rhys can sense that they’re worried, anyway, same as back in the hotel room. “Wait for a clear head.”

He looks down at his palm display, torn. Finally he turns it off, and says, “You’re right,” breathing a sigh.

The person he most needs to tell isn’t around, anyway.

He turns away from Zer0, leaning his forehead against the window, dimly grateful that they don’t take their hand away. He’ll wait until he’s back aboard the Atlas fast courier, and then he’ll call Lorelei and tell her to schedule a meeting with the management team and the board of directors, _in that order, please,_ because he may be chairman and majority shareholder but he that doesn’t mean he’s willing to wade into a board meeting without a _plan_. His team will come up with something, and he’ll spend a few hours panicking, and then he’ll go in front of the board and tell them about how everything is going to be _just fine_.

And when he’s finished with all of that—set everything into motion, reallocated all the resources that he can spare, convinced the shareholders not to jump ship—he’ll lock himself in his office, and record a message for Fiona’s dead drop.

He hopes she still checks it. He hopes that she’s out there, that she’s _safe_ , still running with Athena and Janey and not braving the farthest reaches of the six galaxies all on her own.

Vault hunters work best in teams, after all.

Rhys isn’t alone—he has Zer0, and Lorelei, and Atlas—but this is vault business, and in that there’s only one person he really trusts to have his back. _I can’t do this without you, Fiona._

He will, though. He has to.

He won’t let Promethea fall, or let Maliwan take over Atlas. He won’t let them open the vault, even if the vault itself disagrees.

“Come and get me, Katagawa,” Rhys breathes, and readies to go to war. 

**Author's Note:**

> While no archive warnings do indeed apply, the crux of this story is a (non-sexual) non-consensual act. Furthermore, due to the circumstances, the fear that sexual non-con may have occurred does enter the POV character’s mind, though this is ultimately disproved. Please read with care.


End file.
